If you’re running a small business, you’ve probably ascertained that a social media presence can boost your sales and generate new customer leads. But finding time to boost your social media presence … well, that’s often the biggest challenge.
In this post, you’ll learn how a virtual assistant can work with you to boost your social media presence, leaving you free to focus more on the business of running your business.
The Reality of Social Media for Small Businesses
As your business grows, there will come a point where you simply don’t have time to pay full attention to your social media accounts. Without help, the result will almost certainly be a decline in your social media presence, as subscribers’ comments start to go unanswered and your posts become more and more infrequent.
Think about it though; many larger enterprises connect very well with their fans, customers and subscribers on social media.
They are able to do so not because their CEOs manage the connections and content themselves, but because they have people employed to serve as online brand-ambassadors.
With the help of a virtual assistant, your small business can have the same advantage as the corporate giants—an ambassador who can speak to your leads, customers, and other subscribers in the language of your brand, while you involve yourself personally as much or as little as you want.
All it takes is the right choice of VA, the right training, and your commitment to monitor and support your remote brand-steward while he or she gets comfortable in the role.
Which Tasks Should Your Virtual Assistant Take?
Before exploring which social media tasks you can and should outsource to your virtual assistant, it’s worth mentioning one golden rule of social media outsourcing—don’t divorce yourself entirely from social media participation.
While you can certainly have your Virtual Assistant write some Facebook posts and Tweets for you, it’s wise to spend some time personally connecting with your social media contacts.
The best tasks to outsource are those involved with managing and monitoring your accounts. That in itself can save you an awful lot of personal time. Furthermore, the time you do spend on social media can be used more productively, for example, on creating higher quality posts and promotions.
With that in mind then, you could do a lot worse than to outsource the following social media activities:
• Generation of ideas for social media posts
• Drafting social media content (but remember to produce some content yourself)
• Scheduling content postings
• Monitoring social media and alerting you to comments about your company and/or brand
• Building and managing contact networks (friending, connecting, following, unfriending, etc)
• Interacting with your contacts (liking and sharing posts from industry peers and experts)
• Tracking and reporting social media metrics
• Updating your social media profiles as required (Social networks often change profile formats)
• Managing Facebook advertising
• Analysing and reporting on your competitors’ social media activity
This list of social media obligations is long, but it’s far from exhaustive. It clearly illustrates just how much attention you need to pay social media if you want it to benefit your business.
If you’re currently managing all these activities yourself, imagine how much valuable time you can reclaim by outsourcing them to a virtual assistant. If you’re not currently managing them (and you have nobody else doing so), think of the social media impact your business could gain with a VA taking care of “presence-management”.
Social Media Management Outsourcing: Why Use a VA?
Let’s conclude with one more key advantage of outsourced social media management that hasn’t yet been mentioned. If you recruit specifically for superior social media skills, you should find a VA who can lift your online presence with more success than your own efforts could achieve.
Therefore, for the price of your VA’s services, you’ll get improved results from social media AND reclaim some of your valuable time.
Admittedly, you could outsource to an online marketing company and get similar results, but not without considerable expense. The cost of a virtual assistant (especially one who’s based offshore) will be minimal compared with that of a company offering social media marketing as a service.
Finally, don’t forget that a virtual assistant can offer much more than social media management. At Virtual Done Well for example, we have multi-skilled VAs happy to take on all the tasks which keep you working in your business instead of on it.
If you’d like to find out more about Virtual Done Well, contact our team today. You can reach us online or by phone on +61 2 8045 2311.
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